Trending

“Trending shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. You’ll see stories from people and Pages who’ve shared them with you or have shared them as Public. From the right side of your homepage, click a topic that’s trending to see what people are saying about it.” (See full article here: https://www.facebook.com/help/1401671260054622)

A spokesman from Facebook admits that Facebook’s “Trending” is very similar to a feature that’s been around on Twitter for years, but states that “Facebook’s version is slightly different than that of Twitter.” By different I think they mean it looks rubbish, trends rubbish content, and worse still “Note: Trending isn’t available to everyone right now.”

Isn’t this exclusionary approach to rolling out a feature completely against the nature of social media? Why only some people can use the Trending feature and others can’t on a social media platform as profound as Facebook, I simply cannot comprehend (although I suspect very few people will want to use it anyway).

Is this a white flag of surrender flying high? Is this Facebook taking a seat and admitting defeat to Twitter?

I see the introduction of Trending content as a desperate effort by Facebook to retain it’s existing users and a damage-limitation strategy to the alarming declining figures the network is ‘Faceing.’ But then again, with recent headlines like the following, who can blame them.